Make no mistake about it; all of us are caught in a global war on cyber security!

These past 12 months saw yet more high profile attacks on large organizations like Equifax and Verizon, and experts are predicting that the total cost of data breaches will have reached 2 trillion dollars by 2019!

There have been a few silver linings in 2017, like the cost of a data breach going down 10% over previous years, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before the threat of hackers can be truly eliminated.

With that in mind, here are some of the trends, threats, and challenges that await businesses and security consulting firms in 2018!

1. An AI-led war on both sides

Future artificially intelligent machine learning will process immense amounts of data and perform actions at an incredible scale to identify and correct known vulnerabilities. This is great for organizations and their security needs, since they’ll finally have a system that adapts to evolving threats in real time.

The problem, however, is that the hackers will have access to this technology too!

As security systems get increasingly intelligent, so will the hackers. It’ll be an endless struggle to see which system can get an upper hand first.

2. New General Data-Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Legislative bodies in the European Union have adopted the new GDPR, which explain how companies will store, process, and protect the confidential data of EU citizens.

The new regulation will come into force on the 25th of May, 2018, after which companies can be fined up to 20 million Euros for any breach of the law.

This should mean organizations putting better, more advanced security systems in place, which is definitely good news for all of us!

3. A rising threat of insider attacks

Two of the biggest cyber breaches of the year, Equifax and Anthem Inc. were actually the result of insider attacks, after employees at the company had sold off their shares and disabled the network security.

Organizations around the world are finally realizing the importance of hiring an ELV design consultant to set up CCTV cameras and local network monitoring systems in their buildings.

More often than not, the biggest threat to a company will come not from sophisticated external attacks, but from internal users who gain unauthorized access to confidential data and information.

4. Solutions to ransomware

In the coming months, the occurrence of ransomware attacks should decrease as the industry adopts new solutions to tackle this ongoing problem and users gain more awareness.

These attacks are predicted to have caused almost 5 billion dollars in damages to companies around the world this year, according to multiple reports!

To protect your own systems, we suggest you do the following:

Install an anti-virus and anti-malware software purchased from a reputable vendor.

Don’t open attachments in an e-mail if the sender isn’t a known contact.

Update all your passwords every 6 months and make sure to use different ones for each account.